The Message Remix (277 page)

INTRODUCTION ZEPHANIAH

 

We humans keep looking for a religion that will give us access to God without having to bother with people.
We want to go to God for comfort and inspiration when we’re fed up with the men and women and children around us.
We want God to give us an edge in the dog-eat-dog competition of daily life.

This determination to get ourselves a religion that gives us an inside track with God, but leaves us free to deal with people however we like, is age-old. It is the sort of religion that has been promoted and marketed with both zeal and skill throughout human history. Business is always booming.

It is also the sort of religion that the biblical prophets are determined to root out. They are dead set against it.

Because the root of the solid spiritual life is embedded in a relationship between people and God, it is easy to develop the misunderstanding that my spiritual life is something personal between God and me—a private thing to be nurtured by prayers and singing, spiritual readings that comfort and inspire, and worship with like-minded friends. If we think this way for very long, we will assume that the way we treat the people we don’t like or who don’t like us has nothing to do with God.

That’s when the prophets step in and interrupt us, insisting, “Everything you do or think or feel has to do with God. Every person you meet has to do with God.” We live in a vast world of interconnectedness, and the connections have consequences, either in things or in people—and all the consequences come together in God. The biblical phrase for the coming together of the consequences is Judgment Day.

We can’t be reminded too often or too forcefully of this reckoning. Zephaniah’s voice in the choir of prophets sustains the intensity, the urgency.

 

 

From:
Zephaniah was probably an older cousin of the young King Josiah. His family connections were his credentials, so he stated them up front. An insider in political circles, Zephaniah saw up close what the politicians and wealthy businessmen were doing. And he wasn’t afraid to make them mad.

 

To:
When at age eight Josiah inherited the throne after his father’s assassination, he was lucky enough to have wise and godly teachers steering him away from his father and grandfather’s corruption (murder, child sacrifice, cult prostitution of both sexes, and black magic were a few features of their reigns). Josiah struggled to reform things. The young Jeremiah encouraged him, as did Josiah’s cousin Zephaniah, but it wasn’t easy when almost everybody with money and power liked treating other people as tools to get the gods to do what they wanted.

 

Re:
About 635-625 B.C. As Chinese kings grew weaker in this period, local Chinese warlords grew wealthier and more powerful. As in Israel, China’s economy was based on farming. The warlords owned the land and leased it to individual farmers in exchange for loyalty and a cut of the crops. The warlords also dominated important industries like the manufacture of bronze. China had no prophets with the right to warn leaders against injustice.